1994–2010 Steve Behr & Simon Gardner
The Wilderness Years!
After great success for Poly through the 80’s and early 90’s, the core of that very tight-knit team got older, retired, decided to concentrate on their careers/girlfriends/drinking, and by the late 90’s the club was struggling for players, pool time, funding, and by the mid-2000s spent a few stressful years flirting with collapse. We (Steve Behr, Treasurer before handing over to Simon Gardner who took over as Treasurer and then stepped in as Chairman before being gratefully relieved by Rambo) recount the fallow period where success notwithstanding, good polo was played, a good time was enjoyed by many, and the Poly spirit of togetherness and competitiveness was kept alive.
Steve: Although we consistently ranked in the top teams in GB at the time, there were no trophies or similar accolades. The burden of responsibility to continue the Poly legacy weighed heavily on the senior players that had tasted some of that earlier success and I think in a small way, it hindered rather than helped the club over this period.
When you’re a young player, you don’t really think about who’s arranging things in the background, you just turn up to training, the coach or the senior players generally run the sessions and everything else kind of takes care of itself. That’s what I assumed, until I turned up to training at Porchester one day for training and we weren’t allowed in. It transpired that we owed them a small fortune in pool hire costs, which hadn’t been paid for weeks. Wanting to continue to train, I decided to take over the Treasurer role and try to sort things out, the first challenge was that Poly had no money left! This was primarily because only about 5 players were actually paying their subs, probably because we had so many transient players in and out of the team over that period, from all over the world, plus the student players weren’t expected to pay subs back then.
Simon: I started playing for the Poly in 2000 when I was studying at Imperial and met the eponymous James Reddick at a varsity match. I’d just come back from playing for a club in Sydney, and I was surprised because although on the playing side I recognised the same high standards of dedication and expectation, the foundations of the club were obviously lacking: there was only one men’s team, no youth team or women’s team and a general lack of members and pool time.
Steve: In spite of the challenges above, we were still amongst the best teams in the country. Gary Simons and Paul Annegarn were the leaders of the team. Gary was without doubt the captain (and a passionate one!), Paul Annegarn was a fantastic goalie, winning a Bronze medal for GB in the Commonwealth games. We had other key players still in the squad from the previous team such as Ivan Drinkwater (pit), and many others that contributed such as Neil Drinkwater (pit defence), Steve Margetts, Rob Lucas, Richard Hime, Andy Pring, Noel Quigley, German superstar Stephan Pollman, the Aussies: Neil Cooke, Tim Speir, Adrian Ciano, Sean the Gardener, Hoppy, and the Saffers - Frank Ford, Wayne Cowden.
Simon: After some time away, I rejoined Poly in about 2002 and by this point a lot of the guys Steve mentioned above had left. Gary and Paul were still holding it together, but for quite a few years team selection for NWPL weekends was not so much a selection process as much as a desperate scramble to field a team. There is no way I should have been playing Division 1 at that point (if at any point in my career) but I have a distinct memory of Alberto (legendary Italian coach off and on during this era) grabbing me and telling me to “just swim up and down the wing – don’t worry about the ball”!
The larger issue of the survival of the club loomed large during this time when I took over as Treasurer from Steve, and James Reddick and I (along with many other supportive members) were certain that the base of the club had to grow outside of the Men’s first team. This kick-started a program of activities that eventually included: starting a women’s team; a junior programme in association with Hackney Aquatics; and a very wide search for more pool time. The permanent search for pool time was unfortunately made harder in the years leading up to the 2012 Olympics, as many London councils saw the opening of the National Aquatic Centre in Stratford as an excuse to close other pools. This meant that we were convincing players to travel much further afield to places like Catford, Stoke Newington (handy for Gary and me as we lived there!), and the fantastic Sunday evenings at the Hampstead heath lido. The fact that the lido was unheated meant that most of our European imports hated it, but we eventually turned it to our advantage by arranging London League games there and making other teams suffer!
Money was also extremely tight during this period and there were many committee meetings that included a warning that the club would be insolvent in 6 to 9 months without some kind of rescue funding. Without a doubt the Poly Old Boys kept the club afloat during this period of transition, the first step of which was the work that Steve started to enable the club to claim Gift Aid.
Steve: Special mention must go to Phil Hallwood and Len Hatton OBE who made significant financial contributions over this period to keep the club going. Phil Brayford stepped in as the Club Chairman to help get the club back on track and Simon took over the Treasurer role when I stopped playing. And there was the omnipresent James Reddick of course who was officially Club Secretary but also without doubt one of the most loyal and dedicated members of Polytechnic.
Simon: It wasn’t all doom and gloom in the 2000s. We had a succession of foreign imports that contributed in their own way, including Brazilian international Conrado (who despite bring a pit defender somehow managed to end up top goal scorer), Hungarian Richard Polya, Aussie goalie Greg Bray (who seemed far too sane to be a goalie), Roger the Spaniard (a good player, but somewhat of a liability on a night out – I’m not sure he’s yet recovered from his rude awakening in the worst hotel in Manchester), and Tom Wall the goalie from Hucknall (now coaching England U18s/U20s)!
Steve: One of my most memorable moments was on a weekend tournament in Eindhoven. We decided to nip over to Amsterdam in a taxi one afternoon where we enjoyed some local cafe culture, consuming some nice “cakes”! Unfortunately, one of our senior players had an adverse reaction, and feeling rather paranoid on the way back to the campsite, decided to get into an argument with the taxi driver. The taxi driver pulled over on the motorway and kicked us out. This was before iPhones, google maps and Uber. Although it took us about 8 hours to walk back to the campsite, I remember it being quite a serene and pleasant walk through some nice Dutch countryside despite Simons and Annegarn arguing the whole way back!
Simon: By the mid-2000s, the players in the first team started to get filled out by a core of university students/graduates that started the renaissance, including (among others): Brian Hoy, Carlos and Miguel Ardid, Nik “The Russian” Zhukovsky, Jeremy Johnson, Spyros Tzamtzis (Jamjuice), Alkis “The Animal” Voliotis. Leonidas, Gareth Keen. Along with (slightly) older players such as me, Steve, Danny Davis, Richard Hime, we managed to find the worst B&Bs for National League weekends, but always had a good night out after. Perhaps my favourite memory of this time was going 4 goals up against Penguin in the last weekend of the season at Millfield on a Sunday morning despite most of us still being drunk. We also managed some good pre-season trips to Stockholm and Volos in Greece – home of both Spyros and Alkis. Often we were without a coach, but sometimes with – anyone that has experienced a pre-game talk from Alberto Bertolotti will remember it well, even if they didn’t fully understand it.
Steve: In spite of the limited success in the pool and all the admin hassles, we all have great memories over this period and have built lifelong friendships with one another. We also learnt a lot about the great game and some of us are still trying to play today!
Simon: Although the Wilderness Years may not have provided the Poly with much silverware (apart from a few London League titles – do they count?), we did manage to beat Penguin and Otter most of the time! More importantly, the Poly spirit was maintained, mostly due to the efforts of people like Gary Simons, Steve and of course the legend that is James Reddick. Many fantastic memories were made and the Old Boys of this time remain close and will continue to support the Poly wherever they can.